


The Third Expedition

by HostisHumaniGeneris



Category: Annihilation (2018 Garland)
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Surreal, Trick or Treat: Trick, Weirdness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-26
Updated: 2018-09-26
Packaged: 2019-07-17 17:07:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16100039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HostisHumaniGeneris/pseuds/HostisHumaniGeneris
Summary: She sat on a beach, rereading her journal.





	The Third Expedition

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Edonohana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/gifts).



She sat on the beach, watching the sun rise.  She took a glance at the lighthouse in the distance and took a deep breath, patting down her jacket to retrieve a pack of cigarettes.  She’d never smoked before in her life, had no idea where the zippo and the pack of Marlboro Reds came from.  Lucy might have been the smoker of the group.  She wasn’t quite sure; she was pretty sure she had chided Lucy… jokingly… that those things would kill her. 

The fifth?  Sixth?  Tenth?  The morning they found Lucy’s corpse, she regretted chiding her.  She’d coughed up something black and red, curling up in the tent.  The expedition leader ordered an autopsy, even if they had to _improvise_ in order to get through the ribcage.

Lucy’s lungs were black and mottled.

She had seen everyone’s medical files before they had gotten underway; Lucy might’ve been a smoker but she’d been fit enough to be allowed on the expedition—her lungs were unremarkable.  Though stress caused her to start smoking like a chimney, there was no way her lungs could’ve failed that quickly.  Could they? 

She had no idea how long they truly had been out here, but it still seemed wrong.

There was no way to call in to the Southern Cross, to tell them what had happened.  Just have everyone describe what they saw in their journals, then hand them over when they returned.  As they kept going, there were fewer and fewer people to document what happened.

Cigarette drooping from her mouth as she breathed in and out, she got out their personal journals.  She’d collected them all as the expedition began to winnow down.  She flipped through her journal, looking at her entries.  The first few, the mundane ones, she could not remember ever penning them.  Then she read up; paraphrasing Jennifer as she talked about the bizarre botany they saw; submerged pitcher plants that closed around fish.  And fish that had the feelers of catfish but mouths like alligator gar.

Lucy’s death, and the leader’s orders.  Searching the nearby tool shed for bolt cutters to help open her up.  She thought Dana might’ve had some samples of the tissue, but her rucksack was lost in the fire.  Along with Dana.

She took a drag, and flipped to the end of the journal.  The expedition leader’s death.  Gunshot wound to the head—she didn’t indicate whether it was self-inflicted or not.  She couldn’t remember if it was or not.  She flipped the pages back to the start.  Clean, clear cursive.  Around Lucy’s death, it was shakier, something she wrote in a hurry.  The account of Dana’s death was clean and clear again, in nice, straight printed letters with little serifs. 

She dropped the journal and fished out Dana’s.  She had nice, clean printing at the start, but apparently had been skipping entries for most of the expedition.  Wide, cartoonish-looking cursive at the last entry.  Just Robert Frost line.  “From what I’ve tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire.”  She tried to piece whose handwriting she’d been using at various points of her journal, finding it a patchwork of the others, right up until she turned to printing. 

That entry was mostly just “Help me!”, and a little drawing of a fly—a bit of morbid humor that was uncharacteristic for her.  It wasn’t a fly screaming for help, but a bear.  That was what got Susan.  She and the expedition leader spent a night in a tree, listening to it.  They didn’t have much ammunition left, after dealing with the coyote—damn bite had been what made Dana burn herself, it puffed up and turned black and it looked like some type of poisoning, happened to quickly for it to be an infection from the bit.

So she and the leader were up in the tree, not wanting to use any bullets if they couldn’t be sure it would kill the bear, so they just sat and listened to a bear beg in Susan’s voice while growling.  It stood up on its hind legs and _almost_ reached.

When the expedition leader started to ask questions of it, that’s when the gunshot went off.  She’d cracked, couldn’t help herself anymore.  The only thing worse than the woman being insane was if the bear answered her back.  It didn’t get the opportunity, because a shot and the leader fell out of the tree.

Afterwards, when the bear dragged the carrion off, she had dropped out of the tree, collected the leader’s fallen journal, and kept looking.  The journals were cheap wood pulp in between a cardboard cover, with a little metal spiral.  They were useless—she wasn’t getting out of the Shimmer, and so there was going to be nobody to read the books.

She collected them anyways. 

Collected read and reread.

When the sun started to sink below the waves, she lit her final cigarette—pack was too small, she was going to need nicotine or go crazy soon enough.  Wind kicked up, scattering loose pages; the important ones were all safe in her satchel.

She tore out all of the unimportant bits, and tore the important pages where things stopped making sense.  Where Dana’s handwriting yielded to something like her own, or where Jennifer’s use of British spelling failed and she started writing _color_ instead of _colour_.  It was tough when they maintained consistent writing but changed style, or the same style but different handwriting.  She was alright making the judgment calls, though.

This place was blending them all together.   

She laid the gutted notebooks side, by side and began to pull out the scraps from her pack.  Arranging and rearranging them.  If this place was mixing them all up, she could show it; she was going to piece them all back together.  Part of her screamed this was pointless busy work; it literally did not matter.  But she began to piece things back together; Susan’s word and writing in Susan’s notebook, even if the entries came after Susan died.

If she kept it up, she’d have her story be hers again.

And then she would be able to tell who she was again.

The other her, who had come down to the beach and sat across from her, agreed that it was a good plan.  She was fine with the other her being there.  She did have two bullets left, after all.  Only question was who would pull the trigger.

**Author's Note:**

> You gave me permission to write a preceding expedition, which I took. I really dug the film, and honestly would have loved seeing more of the expeditions that preceded our protagonists (or just a lot more of our protagonists encountering weird stuff). Hopefully this was what you were looking for, but please let me know if it isn't.


End file.
